You immediately encounter a house with half a crocodile protruding from the front wall. A little pink-and-blue gate identifies this residence as the Loveshack.

Next, you walk through a working boatyard, complete with hammering and drilling, into the magical, tumbledown collection of huts and upturned ships that comprise the Eel Pie Island Artists’ Studios. You don’t have to move to the Hebrides to be part of a creative island community. A short walk from Twickenham station will do the trick.

About 26 painters and sculptors have studios here. Over two weekends this summer, they will be opening them to the public.

These artists are not part-timers who dabble in daubing. The wooden exterior of the first studio you come to may be painted a rustic green, and it may have a window box made from a canoe hull, but its occupant is professional painter Lee Campbell. She has been on the island for 14 years. As well as working for private clients, she teaches art at Kingston University, has just carried out commissions at the Shard and the Savoy Hotel, and runs a firm called Art Activities that provides company employees with painting days as an alternative to raft-building in the Brecon Beacons.

Campbell, who was raised in New Zealand, seeks to capture, in her paintings, the mistiness and mysticism of the northern hemisphere. “A lot of my work is inspired by my favourite Robert Graves poem about the forest where old gods go, when no one believes in them anymore,” she says.

Next door, there are three artists, each with an unusual story. Hazel Richards used to specialise in chandeliers with dangling ape figures. “Then I gave up smoking, and I only wanted to make pottery,” she says.

Sitting next to her is Delyth Jones, who sculpts ceramic pigs. “It all goes back to my upbringing on a Welsh farm, which we had to sell,” she says. “This is my way of honouring that past.”

A third studio member, Nicky O’Connor, has gone down the largely untrodden route of creating surreal-shaped shoes out of a material called raku.

It is the chance to be at paintbrush-length distance with the artist that makes the open studio weekends popular. Instead of peering at pieces suspended in a gallery, you see them on the spot where they were created.

That said, painter Sue Knight may have to do a bit of clearing up beforehand. Despite working in a studio 30 yards from the river, she has covered all the windows with white paper. Every horizontal surface – be it floor, shelf or table – is strewn with paint tubes and old J-Cloths.

On the walls are paintings inspired by her wanderings in the countryside. They are not so much landscapes as memories of the experience. “When I was a little girl, when it was just getting light, I used to let myself out of the kitchen door and go out onto my swing in the garden,” she says.

“I have always adored the feeling of space. When I paint, I conjure up from memory the feeling of what it was like to be standing on a clifftop in Cornwall with 360-degree views.”

Listening to her talk, you’d find it hard to imagine that she has been anything but an artist, especially when she describes the repainting and reworking of her canvases, and her search for “that feeling of insouciance where you feel you couldn’t give a monkey’s”. But Knight worked for many years as an academic lawyer.

Artists’ pets are free to wander (GEOFF PUGH)

Indeed, the more Eel Pie Island artists you meet, the more turn out not to come from a bohemian community, but from the puritan school of hard work.

Looking at printmaker Sarah Hubacher’s carefree beach scenes, all sand and umbrellas, you might imagine what a lovely life it must be. Yet, for her, art is a serious business. She might work in an upturned ship’s hull, but she is carrying out commissions for Thames-side show-flats and contemplating converting super-8 cine film into giant-sized artworks. “It may all look haphazard, but the people who work here are serious about what they do,” says Richards. “Everyone respects your space – it’s not a social club.” There is no community café and the lavatories are in a small, shrubbery-clad block next to the boatyard.

There is also the danger that, one day, the river might burst its banks and wreck everyone’s work. “Sometimes the Thames does get too close for comfort,” says Campbell. “Anything made of paper has to be stored well above head height.”

That said, no Eel Pie artist would consider swapping their studio, not least because monthly rents are kept in the benevolently low hundreds. “I used to drive each day to work in an office in Balham, south London,” says Hubacher, who has been working on the island for the past 10 years. “One day, I just couldn’t take it, and turned round and went home. I know how lucky I am here.”

For mosaic ceramicist Gina Elsworthy, it’s the freedom that makes Eel Pie so precious. “If you want to sit up all night and work, you can. If you want to pack up and go home in the middle of the day, you can do that, too.”

While it may be fewer than 10 miles from the centre of London to this little outpost, the journey is more spiritual than geographical. Spend any time

here and you hear a familiar refrain from the artists. “The minute I cross that bridge,” they say, “I feel like a different person.”